Short stories. Weird, creative, clearly influenced by both literary fiction and sci-fi. Pretty queer. The stories explore things like history and memory on a generation ship, a working-class teen on a cross-country road-trip with a rich woman in a car shaped like a whale, escaping anti-semitism in Europe and moving to America with a mechanical …
An English translation of a Persian poem remembering the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran – mostly people, both secular and religious, who supported the revolution but then faced repression by the new regime. Published by a small, new, not-for-profit, left publisher run by women of colour in Toronto, Trace Press. I read this …
A book concerned with “positioning sound and its discourses in dialogue with contemporary struggles,” that attempts to seek out “ethical and agentive positions or tactics” grounded in “experiences we have of listening and being heard” (1). It does this by drawing on the scholarly area of sound studies and a range of other theoretical resources, …
Graphic memoir. I’ve read a couple of graphic novels by the author, but picked this up somewhat randomly not so much for fannish reasons but because I figured it would be a light and quick read. And it was. Drawing largely from material she has previously published online, it follows her life from 2011 to …
The latest collection from master storyteller Ivan Coyote. Charming. Thoughtful. A great mix of heavy and light, grief-laden and joyful. The same wise, compassionate insight into life in general and into gender in particular. This collection seemed to have more very short pieces than I remember from those I’ve read in the past. Which is …
I don’t pay a lot of attention to literary awards for the most part, but the one exception that I regularly make is what used to be called the Tiptree Award and is now the Otherwise Award, the tagline for which is “an award encouraging the exploration & expansion of gender.” I picked this book …
Memoir. Place, desire, compulsion, shame, relationships ending and beginning, abuse, family history, faith. And especially place. The place that it is, especially, is Epping Forest, a 2400 hectare former royal forest in the UK that straddles the border between London and Essex. It is other places too, but particularly there. The author broods and reflects. …
Based on stories of the rogarou, a figure something like a werewolf that haunts Metis communities. Set in such a community on Georgian Bay in Ontario, following a woman whose husband suddenly disappeared almost a year ago. At the beginning of the book, she encounters someone who looks just like him but seems to be …
By Toronto-based writer and performer Kai Cheng Thom. Essays interspersed with poems. Smart. Thoughtful. Challenging. Names not just the violence of the mainstream but its more insidious correlates within communities that style themselves as being of marginalized belonging and/or of resistance. Less ornate in its writing than I for some reason (perhaps because the author …
A scholarly examination of “told-to” narratives in the Canadian context, with some longer-ago history but mostly between the 1970s and 1990s. The told-to narrative is an old form that is of particular relevance to colonial contexts, in which white settler scholars and writers have produced written texts from oral stories told to them by Indigienous …